Sunday, June 3, 2007

The Meaning of Life

If I were a religious man I might believe that there's one truth in this world, known only to God (and perhaps Knuth also figured it out, but I digress).If there really was such a one single truth, it should be possible (although perhaps not economical) to let a computer figure out what it is.Someone once said that if you fill a room with monkey's and typewriters and give it enough time (and bananas!), eventually they will have written the collected works of shakespeare - I suppose this is the idea behind any brute force algorithm (although some might argue that given enough time the monkeys will have evolved into Shakespeare, but again I digress).But it must be possible to speed up such a process....What if I custom-built the typewriters so they could only write real words that shakespeare used? And what if I had the almighty inspire the monkeys to which words should come in sequence? Perhaps I could shorten down the production time of my shakespeare - or the meaning of life...So, eager to learn the true meaning of life (okay, who said "42" ?? shut up!) I devised the following plan:

Gather a collection of quotes from some of the most clever men I can think of (e.g. Einstein, Decartes, Voltaire, Vonnegut & Twain).